That should help, but I’m not certain how much. The problem is that whatever the reason for the rule originally, it’s now ingrained as a moral absolute in some people’s minds.
Kingreaper
Karma: 1,284
I’ll agree with Nornagest on the insult to injury part, but there’s also a second part:
If you talk about someone’s failings after they die, but not before, then you seem to have been waiting until they were no longer available to defend themselves.
IOW: it seems cowardly, and dishonest. Because if they were still around, they might be able to dismiss your allegations.
Yes. The relevant experiment would be a study of how gases expand when heated, leading to the ideal gas law, which has a special case at absolute 0.
The special case distinguishes between cold being a real entity (and heat being neg-cold) and heat being a real entity (and cold being neg-heat); because it proves that heat has a minimum, and cold a maximum, rather than the other way around.
By a “meetup” I mean a regular, or semi-regular, event whereby a group of people with common interests meet in order to discuss things, including [but not limited to] the common interest.
These meetups come in many forms; some occur in pubs, some in meeting halls, some in coffee shops. Some feature speeches, which tend to be on the issue of the common interest, but most do not.
By attending a meetup two events running, or three events out of six, you’ll tend to get to know many of the regulars, and become part of their social network.
One type of meetup that would obviously be relevant to your interests is a lesswrong one, but meetups of skeptic societies, societies associated with your particular sexual kinks/relationship preferences (poly meets, munches, rope meets, furmeets etc.), humanist meetups, etc. would all likely be useful to you.
Getting to the moon (ie. getting your life moving) is quite clearly one of your terminal goals.
Whether or not you’ve enshrined the car (ie. a general solution) as a newer terminal goal, I can’t tell you.
A hint however: The car may not take the form you expect. It may be a taxi, or a bus, where you don’t own it but rather ride in it. (ie. the best general solution for you might actually be “go on the internet and look for a specific solution”)
I’d say that your statement:
It rules out doing anything that involves regularly scheduled activities
Is inaccurate. It rules out regularly scheduled activities where you have to attend every single one.
The majority of meetups are perfectly happy with someone who attends 1⁄2 or 1⁄3 of the meetings; which non-24 shouldn’t prevent.
Meetups also have a more structured feel than the social gatherings you mention, and tend to be more useful for networking.
A deeper problem is your location. I’m assuming given your sunlight issue that you can’t really drive very far on sunny days?
Concentrating on just the final paragraph first, because it provokes the most interesting answer IMO.
Imagine a heinous murder in which the killer did it “just for the fun of it”. Yet upon psychiatric and medical examination he is found to have a tumor the size of a golf ball in the medial prefrontal cortex of his brain (this area is responsible for emotional control and behavioral impulse). It would be fairly easy to surmise that he was not in any real sense responsible for his actions in carrying out the murder.
Really, why?
He was not in his right mind.
Not quite. He was his mind; where he refers to the man with a tumor. He was not in tumor-free-man’s right mind. So we punish man-with-tumor, not man-without-tumor, as they are clearly very different people.
We would not prescribe the same punishment for him as we would a perfectly healthy individual.
Depends which state you live in. By removing the tumor, we are essentially killing man-with-tumor. Replacing him with man-without-tumor, a completely different person. If you live somewhere with the death penalty, that is in fact the punishment you would give a healthy individual.
Would it be moral to deny this man surgery as a ”punishment” for his crime?
In what way would that be a punishment for man-with-tumor, the entity that commited the crime? Man-without-tumor would be punished by that, due to continued non-existance, but man-with-tumor would not.
Then first, change your situation to NOT completely isolated.
If you’re in a town or city that’s easy, just go to a meetup of a society of some sort that sounds vaguely interesting. If you can’t find such a society, wonder from pub to coffee shop to restaurant, looking for any relevant posters.
Or just go online and look up a meetup website.
Looking for a general solution is all well and good, but you have a very specific problem. And so, rather than spending years working on a general solution while in the wrong environment, perhaps you’d be better off using the specific solution, and working on a general one later?
Here are two ways to find more opportunities. 1) is to get out and DO!, which exposes you to more opportunities.
2) is to get better at spotting them when they’re around.
The only way I can think of to achieve 2, personally, is practise. How do you practise? Well, you do 1), and expose yourself to as many opportunities as possible, and see how many you notice in time, and when you notice one too late you think about how you could have noticed it quicker.
“Just go out and DO it!” is then the wrong advice.
However “Just go out and DO!” remains good advice.
Next time you see a poster for a meetup; just go to it. Even if it doesn’t sound like it’ll help, just go to it.
Next time you see a request for volunteers, which you can afford the time to fulfil, just volunteer. Even if it’s not something you care much about.
While you’re out doing those things you’ll come across people, and random events, etc. that may give you new paths to your goals.
Don’t worry about achieving your goals, just do things. To use your video-game analogy: you’ve been looking around for things that look like they’ll be useful for you. But you haven’t been pressing random buttons, you haven’t clicked “use” on the poster in the corner: because why would that help? But of course, sometimes there’s a safe behind the poster. Or sometimes, pressing shift and K simultaneously activates the item use menu, etc.
This counterstory doesn’t function.
A child’s development is not consciously controlled; and they are protected by adults; so believing incorrect things temporarily doesn’t harm their development at all.
If you wish to produce a counterstory, make it an actual plausible one. Even if it were the case that children tended to be more skeptical of claims, your story would REMAIN obviously false; whereas Constant’s story would remain an important factor, and would raise the question of why we don’t see what would be expected given the relevant facts.
Also, if one is positing that there’s a civilization advanced enough to spend time making sims, one can reasonably argue that they will be capable enough such that any of them could program the sim themselves, in a way similar to how anyone can program a Basic program to say “Hello World!” in our world.
Our civilisation is advanced enough to spend time making computer games. This doesn’t mean the average person can make a computer game.
Anologously, in the hypothetical highly advanced civilisation, it could be that it’s considered basic to program a halo-equivalent, but only very few would be able to program a worldsim.
It annoys me that publishing such a deliberately dishonest story will almost certainly not be punished in any way.
The question is not whether or not christianity is true, it’s whether or not you set out to create an argument that christianity should be followed.
So, did you stumble across this argument as a realisation while thinking on other things?
Or did you deliberately set out to create such an argument?
It looks like a deliberately constructed argument to me.
The fact that we do not see continual interference, and obvious evidence of a deity, is very strong evidence against the ego-trip theory of godly existence.
The fact the bible mentions multiple gods, repeatedly, throughout the old testament, is very strong evidence that it is not a book written by an ego-tripping deity.
Moreover, if the universe is being run as an ego-trip heaven is likely to be, as described in some christian sects, praising ‘god’ for all eternity. Which is worse than most depictions of hell; making the whole pascal’s wager thing null and void.
I wouldn’t take it. I desire to help others, and it gives me pleasure to do so, it makes me suffer to harm others, and I desire not to do so.
Being perpetually in a state of extreme pleasure would make this pleasure/suffering irrelevant, and might lead me to behave less in line with my desires.
So, being perpetually in a state of extreme pleasure seems like a bad idea to me.
Good point. It can result in a kill-or-cure situation, either they take it as “I can solve this” and gain confidence, or that they can’t, and lose even more.
You don’t need to reject CCC without reductionism to defeat his argument. His argument is “If CCC is true, reductionism is false”
That’s not a reason to reject reductionism, unless you have better reason to hold to CCC than to reductionism.
The solution here is a stopgap that just diminishes the urgency of technology to grow organ replacements, and even if short-term consequentially it leaves more people alive, it in fact worsens out long-term life expectancy by not addressing the problem (which is that people’s organs get damaged or wear out).
[parody mode]
Penicillin is a stopgap that just diminishes the urgency of technology to move people onto a non-organic substrate, and even if short-term consequentially it leaves more people alive, it in fact worsens out long-term life expectancy by not addressing the problem (which is that people live in an organic substrate vulnerable to outside influence)
[/parody mode]
Have you ever heard the saying “the perfect is the enemy of the good”? By insisting that only perfect solutions are worthwhile, you are arguing against any measure that doesn’t make humans immortal.
I’d be intrigued to see an example of an argument for the statement:
“You can’t be racist/sexist/whatever without intentionally being a bigot”
because I have never seen that sentiment expressed in my life. And I find it hard to see many people agreeing with it. Reasoning that it is false is far too simple.*
*(imagine a world where the general belief is that green people are brutish and ignorant, and should be killed on sight. Now imagine a farmer who has been told this, and believes it, and has never seen any evidence to the contrary. Has he ever made a decision of the form “Should I be bigoted? Yes I should”?)